Gesture Drawing For Animation
And yet another:
These are all gestures we use in different degrees during our daily living. Slightly, in
ordinary circumstances, more exaggeratedly when mimicking or telling a story, and
greatly magnified when animating. Go back over these examples and study how the
solid-flex parts of the body (see Chapter Three) were employed in order to execute those
movements. Work your eyes from drawing to drawing observing the use of angle against
angle, squash against stretch, close proximity to openness.
Connecting Actions
For the action study’s sake, forget the realism and go for the action. I say action rather
than pose because although we use poses in animation, every pose is in reality an action.
No one ever just does nothing, especially in animation. If there is a pose it is either
because something has just happened or is about to happen. If something funny has just
happened, give the audience an additional thrill by ending up with a funny pose. If
something is about to happen, give the audience that superior feeling that they have
figured out that something is about to happen. In true life, the wheels of the mind turn
undetected by observers; in cartoons that thinking process has to be caricatured. The story
line takes care of a lot of that but the bulk of it is done visually. That is why we have such
broad anticipations, “takes,” squashes and stretches, arcs, slow-ins and slow-outs, follow-
throughs and overlaps, and long moving holds where you want to build up to some
situation or let down from one—some pose you want to “milk” for all its worth.
So for the purposes of studying life drawing for animation, one pose does not tell enough,
because seldom will the animator be faced with just a one pose scene. So ideally there
should be at least three poses to study and portray each action:
- The Preparation – telling the audience something is going to happen,
- The Anticipation – gathering the forces to carry through with the action, and
- The Action – carrying out of the intended action.
Plus, of course, all the follow-through, overlap and resulting residuals—dust, smoke,
wind, destroyed property, chaos... whatever.